I’ve been fortunate to work in a number of SaaS businesses in my career.
Some of them, like InVision and SafetyCulture, seemed to just grow naturally without any help. Sure adding sales & marketing help fuel the growth, but these business were growing pretty rapidly before they injected the sales & marketing rocket fuel.
In others however, growth has seem like a slog. We had great sales & marketing teams and growth definitely did happen, but it just seemed a lot more difficult.
So what’s the difference between these companies? And more importantly, how do you become one of the ones that grows...

Just a few months into my stint at Campaign Monitor, a new CEO joined to lead the company.
That CEO was a guy named Alex Bard.
Alex co-founded the well-known SaaS company Desk.com before selling it to Salesforce and becoming the VP of Service Cloud (their second largest business unit, behind Sales Cloud).
During his time at Salesforce, Alex was fortunate enough to work directly with Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, and together they utilised a framework Benioff himself devised called the V2MOM to align and manage the Service Cloud team.
When Alex joined Campaign Monitor a few years later, he brought the...

Content marketing can be an incredibly successful approach to customer acquisition for B2B SaaS companies.
And there is a lot of content out there that can teach you how to do it effectively as well, with the likes of HubSpot, Marketo and Kapost all producing great content that’ll help you create a winning content marketing strategy for your company.
However, I’ve found there is a lot less content around how to actually execute content marketing on a day to day basis.
So in this post, I wanted to share with you the process we use to manage our content machine in the hope...

The PDF eBook has been a staple of content marketing for a very long time, and for good reason too.
It’s a great lead or subscriber magnet to offer people, and when done right it can significantly increase the amount of leads you generate and help build your all important email list.
So when I sat down to plan out our latest guide on How to get Better Marketing Results with Beautiful Design, my natural inclination was to create a PDF eBook that would live behind a landing page with a lead capture form.
The medium wasn’t even part of my planning to...

I have to hand it to the guys at Buffer, the recommended content section was a genius play. Not only did they create a feature that has probably tripled product usage, but they created a content distribution channel that they can use to send content on a sharing rampage.
I’d heard through a content marketing friend of mine that getting featured in their recommended section drives a ton of social sharing activity, and I was definitely intrigued by the idea.
That said, the recommended section is human curated and Courtney, Kevan and the guys over at Buffer know content well, so getting...

Late last month, I was fortunate to take some time off to head up to Splendour In The Grass in Byron Bay with a few friends.
It was quite the event, with 40,000+ people all converging in one bigass field outside of Byron for 3 days of music and drinking.
There were probably 100+ bands playing over the 3 days, and we went and saw a good number of them
Whilst always fun, the problem with this is that you end up going and seeing bands that you only partially like. You know maybe 2-3 of their most popular songs, and the rest...

You’ve worked so hard.
You’ve written an incredible post.
You know your audience will be delighted, as your post has heaps of actionable ideas on how they can make their lives better. You’ve even tweaked the headline to perfection. It grabs attention. It arouses curiosity. It’s got it all.
You publish the post and get some good sharing activity and attention, but then you noticed in your analytics tool that nothing good actually happened.
You got all this traffic to the post but then everyone just left. Nobody signed up for your product or requested a demo.
It’s a feeling that is all too familiar...

I am a big fan of the Content Marketing being done by the guys over at Buffer. I think they create some great content and I have personally learnt a lot from them about happiness, productivity and other topics.
Recently however, I was looking at their Open Blog and in particular the Content Marketing Report for April and found some of the statistics quite interesting. Here’s a rundown:
729,832 unique visitors
962,389 total visits
1,193,967 pageviews
1,604 conversions
22,291 total email subscribers
20 total posts published
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Now I don’t want to take anything away from them here, 729,000 unique visitors is incredible and it’s probably one...

These days we have more access to great information on marketing our SaaS products than ever before. People like Sean Ellis, Neil Patel, Chris Hexton, Peep Laja and many others choose to share their knowledge of online marketing via blog posts and eBooks and it is all available for us to learn completely free as long as we have the desire.
But do you get the feeling that there is just so much you could be doing it’s hard to know how it all fits together to achieve that illusive ‘Growth’?
I’ve been fortunate to lead marketing & growth for several great...

In a recent post on my blog titled 4 stages of growth hacking, I make the point that optimising your Growth Engine is often an overlooked step of the Growth process. Without having an optimised growth engine (particularly an optimised acquisition funnel & a low churn rate) you will have a very difficult time scaling your growth either because you cannot find profitable channels or your high churn rate means you’ll hit a growth ceiling.
However too often those responsible for optimising a Growth Engine focus on the best practices out there. They hear see the tactics and the stories listed...